In the apparent march towards socialism that the nation is undertaking, the point is often made that the young generations, the millennials and “post-millennials” born after 1980, have no memory whatsoever of Soviet Communism or the Cold War. They never got to hear first-hand, on the news, in school, or in the ordinary conversation of family and friends, of how the left-wing utopia of the Soviet Union (d. 1991) was a criminal disaster on stilts. Therefore, they have a susceptibility to the lures of state control of the means of production, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, Universal Basic Income, and all the rest.
There he is! Karl-Marx-Stadt / Chemnitz, GDR, 1978. photocredit: Getty
Having hung out with members of these generations for all of this millennium, as a college instructor, I can attest to one pertinent aspect of their consciousness. These young people cannot identify Karl Marx. And when he is pointed out, they cannot muster an interest in him. It is worth acknowledging this fact and inquiring after its significance.
The basic difference between pre-millennials and those younger, in this connection, is that the first group knows about Marx and Communism, and the second does not. The opportunity the millennials are offering us, in their ignorance of Communism, is to consider this interesting question: how would we assess Karl Marx absent knowledge of the 20th century?
The answer, I submit, is that we would not have occasion to notice him. In the capacious context of the 19th century, his own, Marx cut essentially no figure. I say this because for several decades, I have taught classes and run seminars in 19th-century economic history and intellectual history. In both fields, Marx is difficult to identify or even discover.
Marx’s natural home turf was not economic history—he had nothing to do with the economy outside of being a sometime economics journalist—but the Germanic philosophical tradition as it swelled into its fullness in the mid-19th century. This was the era inaugurated by Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, and J.W. von Goethe and carried forth by immense names in a dauntingly long list: Hegel, Fichte, Humboldt, Herder, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Stirner, Feuerbach, Heine, Bauer, Strauss, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, plus competitive figures in France and elsewhere from Comte to Bergson.
Demonstrably, Marx was a second-tier participant in this tradition, an epigone and an epiphenomenon. The basic question investigated in this long, strange excursus in the epic of Western civilization was the degree to which the collective consciousness (a term Durkheim and Jung would employ) of the advanced peoples was appropriate to the “objective conditions” of the world at the time. In the best scenario, in this tradition, a collective consciousness that was slightly “ahead” of real-world conditions could serve as a powerful (indeed the most powerful possible) impetus for practical reform. This, indeed, was the contemporary definition of “enlightenment,” as the Germans wrested leadership of that intellectual movement from the French.
Marx was an unremarkable contributor to this tradition, stacked as it was with far more penetrating minds. For example, when I see students assigned to read Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” from early in Marx’s career (the 1840s), their natural reaction is to drop Marx on completion and take up Feuerbach on their own, with that way leading on to all sorts of others that never involve Marx again. When it comes to the era of Marx’s Capital of the 1860s-80s, it is impossible to keep students on that and away from their naturally coalescing interests in the Schopenhauer circle and Nietzsche. (They find Dühring himself more interesting than Engels’s “Anti-Dühring.”) As for Marx in the mode of his famous “style” (that of an aspiring misanthropic comedian), he is again bested by ineffable lyricists and comic philosophers from Schiller to Heine.